Intel claims it’s driving supercomputers. Not AMD

Chip firm AMD is blowing its own trumpet by saying its Jaguar system is the world’s supreme supercomputer.

But AMD’s new friend Intel is not going to take that lying down. It has fired out a statement claiming that 402 systems on the Top 500 list use Intel microprocessors. And, it said, three of those are in the top 10 systems.

It’s using this call to announce a High Performance Computing (HPC) optimized version of a six core chip called Nehalem-EX.

This runs at higher frequencies than eight core versions and that will give advantages on some HPC workloads.
The chip will be released in the first half of next year.

Intel also said that it’s introducing a beta program for Ct technology, a method of using parallel programming in C and C++ by creating auto generated code across multicore CPUs.

NASA and SGI have servers containing 2,304 Xeon 5500 CPUs and that boosts the calculating power of the Pleiades supercomputer by 35 percent it claimed. Pleiades uses 14,080 Xeons right now.

Intel also boasts that Number 10 on the list of Top500 is the Sandia National Labs and Sun supercomputer dubbed Red Sky – it has over 10,000 Intel Xeon 5500 series processors.